The website of the EU Parliament was temporarily unavailable because it was paralyzed by a DDoS attack, according to Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament. A group close to the Kremlin is said to have claimed responsibility for the attack.
The website and all services were not available during the day on Wednesday, November 23.11rd. The press officer of the EU Parliament, Jaume Duch, announced via Twitter that “the site is not available due to a DDoS attack. Some services of the EU Parliament are currently disrupted by the targeted overload”. Late in the evening, Jaume Duch reported via Twitter that the DDOS attack had been contained and that the European Parliament website was fully accessible again. However, the EP services would continue to monitor the situation.
DDoS attack by Kremlin-affiliated group
Roberta Metsola, the President of the European Parliament, also made a notable tweet “@Europarl_EN
has fallen victim to a sophisticated cyber attack. A group close to the Kremlin has acknowledged this. Our IT experts defend themselves against this and protect our systems. And that's after we declared Russia a state that supports terrorism. My answer: #SlavaUkraini”.
Strong attack - but probably little damage
The IT structure of the EU Parliament website is apparently not as badly protected as many think. The page was not accessible for a long time due to the overload, but no major damage has apparently happened. At least the entire website was available again in the evening.
While DDoS attacks are technically an old type of attack, they remain effective. Netscout recently stated that there were over 2022 million DDoS attacks worldwide in the first half of 6. In EMEA, over 350.000 DNA amplification attacks were among the top 20 vector attacks. This tool is a boost attack for a DDoS attack.
More at Europarl.Europa.eu